Comics

When I was a kid I loved comics but my parents were artists. They had nothing against the medium but I think they wanted me to be exposed to a certain kind of comic. Instead of superheroes I spent my Early years with Tintin and Little Nemo. Though both works carry a lot of colonial baggage they left me with a love for stories of adventure, exploration and the fantastic. Later as I grew older I began reading the comics in the Newspaper. Of these, the only one that I really enjoyed was Bloom County. It was funny, irreverent and occasionally mentioned my home town, Albuquerque. Later still, I discovered Heavy Metal magazine. Artists like Richard Corben, Juan Giménez and Jean Giraud were some of my favorites. Finally, a Gundam obsessed friend in high school introduced me to the world of manga.

Back to the top.

Books

I like to read just about anything but my favorite books always seem to fall into the three P's: Philosophy, Poetry and Pulp fiction. Here's a list of what I've been reading since I started this page.

• The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle 2019 Stuart Turton. This has to be one of the most interesting books I've read in a long while. Maybe it's a Sci-Fi novel? Maybe it's an Agatha Christie style whodunit? Maybe it's a novel about class and manners in post WWI England? Whatever it is, if you like mysteries, you should really check this out.
• Absolute FreeBSD 2018 Michael W. Lucas. This is a well written manual covering the history, use and installation of FreeBSD. I liked the history section and the writing style was engaging but my real problem is that I'm not sure who it's for. It contains a small subset of what you can find for free in the FreeBSD Handbook. Maybe it would be useful for someone trying to get a system up and running if they didn't have access to the internet?
• Scanners Live in Vain 1950 Cordwainer Smith. A classic SciFi tale about a future where space travel causes unsurvivable pain. An order of people who are cut off from sensation are the only ones who can crew the ships that ferry sleeping travelers between worlds. How will the order react when someone discovers how to travel safely between the stars? It's a fun story but also a mediation on the limits of truth and logic. Not surprising for the man that wrote the first book on psychological warfare. Worth a read on it's own and because it lays the groundwork for Simth's Instrumentality of Man stories.
• Nettle-Eater 2021 Tom Hirons. A beautiful little book about going mad (or maybe becoming sane) on the wild moor. Rich with imagery which builds on but doesn't ape the stories and legends of Celtic Britain. Hedgespoken Press did a fantastic job of putting it together. Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy.
• The Poems of Nakahara Chuya 1993 Mackintosh and Sugiyama (trans.). A collection of poems that span the short literary career of C. Nakahara. I found it hard to get into this book. Maybe I'm not crazy about Symbolist poetry? I don't know enough about the subject to say. I found many of these poems to be too maudlin for my taste. Maybe it's my complicated relationship with nostalgia? But I really didn't connect with many of these poems. That said, I did like Nakahara's flair for description and meter. Worth checking out if only to read poems that are hugely influential for so many Japanese artists and poets.
• Selected Poems 1963 William Carlos Williams. This was my first exposure to Williams' poetry and I really enjoyed it. In particular, the breadth of subject matter and style really stood out. The poems range from evocative descriptions of landscape and nature to insightful social commentary to the ridiculousness of dancing naked in front of the mirror or the excitement of seeing his neighbor bringing in the milk in her nightgown. Perhaps that's not surprising the content is varied as the book covers a large portion of Williams' career, spanning from 1912 to 1950. I'm completely unqualified to comment on whether this is a good entry into Williams' work but, taken on it's own, it's an excellent volume of poetry. If you can track down a copy, I would highly recommend it!
• Hypnotizing Chickens and Other Stories 2016 Jan Sherman. The author tells stories about her childhood in Mogollon between 1928 and 1940. Interesting cultural history and a reminder of how different things were back in the 20th.
• China Root 2020 David Hinton. An examination of the influence of Taoism on the development of Zen Buddhism. This is an important book as I feel like many western Buddhists aren't aware of the history of the Tao and it's undeniable influence on Zen. Hinton does a fantastic job of laying out his thesis, that Chinese intellectuals abandoned the religious traditions of Buddhism and ended up with something profoundly Taoist. He's not wrong. All you have to do is look at the way the Pali canon focuses of avoiding desire and entanglement and compare that to the Zen approach of recognizing these feelings as inevitable and allowing them to pass by to see the strong influence of the Tao. That said, I do think that ascribing all the changes wrought to Buddhism as it passed through China to Taoist intellectuals closes off other interesting avenues of inquiry. First, we need to recognize that, much in the same way Jesus was Jewish, the Buddha was a Hindu. Even though Buddhism is distinct from Hinduism the early Buddhist teachings are couched in the dogmas and intellectual frameworks of Hinduism. Second, Buddhism is, in some ways, a dangerous religion. The idea that there is no such thing as an independent self casts all as equals and the avoidance of attachment presents the hoarding of wealth as a profoundly immoral act. Taoism or no, these ideas would have been transformed by the non-Hindu, highly stratified Chinese society. Heck, we can see the same things playing out as Buddhism comes to the west and is recast as mindfulness. All in all, an excellent book. A must read for Zen practitioners and anyone with an interest in the history of Buddhism.
• India Love Poems 1967 Tambimuttu (trans.). A collection of love poems from the 1st century to the (then) modern day. This is an interesting book, especially for when it was written and it delves into an area of poetry with which I have no experience. Sadly, the poetry isn't to my taste. However, if you like extremely flowery descriptions of women's bodies including a large number of similes about breasts, this might be the book for you.
• The Ghostway 1984 Tony Hillerman. A murder mystery starring Navajo tribal policeman Jim Chee. Hillerman's mysteries are atmospheric, gripping and fun to read. Back in the day, they were a refreshing break from the Hollywood stereotype of the the Indian in the American west. Hillerman portrays his Navajo characters as fully modern people but without diluting their culture and it's effect on their lives. The Navajo people (well, person... Hi Vern!) I've talked to about it like Hillerman and his portrayal of life in the Navajo Nation. Still, this is a book about indigenous people written by a white man and that's important to keep in mind.

Back to the top.

Computers

My father was heavily involved in the design of some of the first digital-analog synthesizers back in the 1960s. I grew up around computers and electronics and I always loved the joy of discovery that came with using them. I guess I lost that joy somewhere along the way but as I turn away from the corporate internet, I'm starting to find it again. Here's my computing history.

1. PT SOL-20 The SOL-20 was the first computer I ever used. I remember it seemed very futuristic at the time. I mostly used it to play Lunar Lander but I did do some BASIC programming with it.
2. Apple IIe My school required all students to buy a computer. They had a deal with apple which allowed us to get a brand new IIe at cost. I loved it. The software and documentation available were light years ahead of the SOL. I did lots of BASIC programming and got into banging on the bare metal with PEEKs and POKEs. The first game I bought was Bug Attack but I really fell in love with games like Temple of Apshai and Ultima III.
3. C64 Let's be honest, I only used this to play games. Ultima and Might and Magic were favorites.
4. Wyse WY-50 After I got out on my own, I was living in San Francisco and had no money. I found a WY-50 in a dumpster. Paired with a 300baud modem I used it to access BBSs and later, once I returned to New Mexico, the DEC Ultrix systems at UNM. ATD!
5. Amiga 500 Pretty soon, It became obvious that a dumb terminal wasn't going to cut it for university classes. I got a used A500 with the 512kb memory expansion and the real time clock. The Amiga was a great machine! I did plenty of programming with it; AREXX and some 68k assembler. Though, most of my programming was done in c and c++ on the university's DEC Ultrix systems. The Amiga was a great games machine and I played lots of them. Lemmings, Populous, Phantasie, The Chaos Engine, Stuntcar Racer, Midwinter, Syndicate, Etc., Etc.
6. A2000HD This was just a continuation of my Amiga 500, though it worked better and looked prettier thanks to Workbench 2.0, more memory and ECS graphics. My A2000 originally came with a 40mb MFM hard drive. If there was any voltage change while it was spinning up, it would corrupt all the data on the drive. If the compressor on the fridge happened to kick on while the computer was booting, I was boned. I found a busted SCSI card with drive for cheap and, after replacing a couple of burnt diodes, had a much more reliable setup.
7. Linux PC About this time, Commodore was self destructing rather spectacularly. I jumped ship and cobbled together a 486 PC with a Tseng Labs graphics card (1024x768 with 256 colors!). I was used to UNIX from school so I slapped a copy of Slackware on it (I think it was Kernel v. 1.13.) and was good to go. I had X11 running TWM and a complete g++ toolchain. The UX wasn't as good as my old Amiga but it was much more functional. And, that's where I've been ever since.

I have to admit, I have had a few excursions into Mac land. When I was in high school, my Dad had a Mac SE. I didn't use it too much but I remember thinking that Hypercard was great! I also had a G4 laptop, though I used it to run BSD so I'm not sure that counts.

I just got an NEC PC-8201a. I'm currently getting it hooked up to the internet to use for writing and coding. you can check out the progress on my Projects page.

Back to the top.